Announcer: Bulletproof Radio. A state of high performance.

Dave: You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave [inaudible 00:00:15]. Today's cool fact of the day is that increased nature time leads to decreased behavior problems in kids. Who would've thought? Put kids outdoors. They stop complaining. Well, at least if they're not complaining about their iPad or lack thereof.

Dave: Recent research that just came out shows that spending time in nature has a bunch of different health benefits. Environmental programs around the world are trying to treat this nature deficit disorder, and the WHO, the World Health Organization is monitoring implementation of the [inaudible 00:00:48] commitment to providing every child with access to green spaces to play and exercise in within 300 meters. And now they're doing a new 16-parent questionnaire to measure connectedness to nature in very young children, and this is through the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Hong Kong and also through the University of [inaudible 00:01:07], and what they found is that there's four areas that show whether kids are tied into their environment: Enjoyment of nature, empathy for nature, responsibility towards nature, and awareness of it.

Dave: And the results of the study showed that parents who saw their kids had a closer connection with nature had less distress, less hyperactivity and fewer behavior and emotional difficulties and improved pro-social behavior.

Dave: Well, it turns out it matters for you as well, but if you, like me, are a parent, and you can get your kids a dose of this stuff, you might actually have a much lowered stress and cortisol level yourself as a parent, and that's why I like to kick my kids outdoors every day for at least an hour even if it's raining. Rain makes you tough, right?

Dave: Today's guest is with Kindred Bio hacker, a guy who used to actually be a coaching client of mine years and years ago, and he's a lifestyle design expert who spent the last 20 plus years developing lifestyle-based powerful principles on health and spirituality, while allowing room for technology and urban living and things like that. And, he's also a motivational speaker, a [inaudible 00:02:21] yoga and meditation teacher, and host of the Life stylist Podcast, and if you've been a podcast consumer for a long time, you might have heard my interview on there, I think back in 2016, talking about Luke Storey. Welcome to the show.

Luke: Dave, it's good to be back on Skype with you. It's been a little while.

Dave: It has indeed. It's good to chat. We had you on Bulletproof Stories, our video in 2017, and I think just recently at the Bulletproof Labs in Sana Monica, you did a meditation class which was pretty cool, and you're always talking Bulletproof, and I see you on social which is awesome.

Luke: Yeah, I'm a convert, dude. I mean, that's the thing is when I find something that works, I talk about it, and Bulletproof has been one of those things for me.

Dave: You've always been at the Bulletproof conferences. You coming to the one this year in April?

Luke: Oh hell yeah. Of course.

Dave: All right. And I'm really hoping that we get to see Luke, probably hanging upside down from a rope in an advanced yoga posture or something.

Luke: Something like that.

Dave: Is that the plan.

Luke: Yeah, out front with my shirt off doing breath work, something to get myself lively.

Dave: I think that's a good plan.

Dave: Let's talk about lively, Luke. You do a lot things to maintain your energy. I mean, you and I spent some substantial time talking when you were first getting going back when I think you were doing the Story of Style was your original thing. You were talking about how you came out of that side, and how you've had a mindful waking up for lack of a better word.

Dave: What made you go from more style focused to like hey, there's something deeper? W hat was the transition?

Luke: Well, you know, it's funny, Dave. I've had kind of a double life the whole time I've lived in Hollywood. I moved here in 1989 when I was 19 years old, and as a kid, I had a very dysfunctional family, experienced a lot of trauma, a lot of issues with addictions and things like that, so I split home when I was 19 and moved to Hollywood to be a rock star, and frankly, to do drugs freely without parental interference.

Luke: So, by the time I was 26, I had pretty much burned my entire life down, and at that point, I started really getting into health and spirituality. And back then, health was ... You had infrared saunas. You had smoothies at the health food store with bee pollen and bananas. Giant carrot juices. Like the early days. Making [inaudible 00:04:45]. Stuff like that. [inaudible 00:04:48] The things that were big in the 90s in the health scene.

Luke: So I got in to all of that to detox my body from all of the self destructive Hollywood rock and roll lifestyle that I had been living, and then started getting into meditation and reading spiritual books and all of that, but what I did for a career in addition to playing music not that successfully, financially at least, is I began a fashion stylist. So, at 26, I sobered up. My first job, after I had this kind of awakening and was rendered, thankfully sober, my first job was working for Aerosmith's fashion stylist.

Luke: And so, I'm this kid who's had all these problems with drugs and stuff. I get sober, and as fate would have it, I get hired by Aerosmith who were also sober at that time, and so there was this synergy there, and so I started to really live this spiritual life and be all

into the health stuff, but was totally catapulted into the Hollywood machine and started working with celebrities and things like that, and so I did that for 17 years, actually just dressing rock stars, celebrities and working in the Hollywood company town machine, but in my off time, I wasn't really interested in much of that at all.

Luke: In my off time, I was going to India to learn how to meditate and train, every kind of supplementation and bio hacking device and all of the things that you and I are in to, and then 10 years ago started my fashion school called School of Style which I still own and operate now. It's an online business.

Luke: It's like I would turn my friends on to all these practices, and we'd all be detoxing and learning all these strange types of yoga and doing all that stuff, but then my day job was back to Mr. Fashion, Mr. Hollywood, so three years ago, when we were doing coaching and I was wanting to exist that industry because it was very unhealthy, and also I just had kind of lost my passion for it. I made a decision to just shut that down with the exception of my school and move into this space, and now it's been three years or so that this has kind of really taken off with the podcast as the catalyst and then doing, as you said, a lot of public speaking events and things like that, and so it's like, for me, I've been doing this the whole time for the past 22 plus years, but to other people on the outside, it appears like, "Oh wow, so you just kind of came out of nowhere three years ago." But this has always been my deepest passion just because my life has been transformed so much by all of these different practices and modalities and all that.

Dave: One of the reasons I wanted a name for bio hacking ... You know, I'm sure, it's in Merriam Websters finally as a real word in the English language, but I wanted a definition and a word for the community. That's why I started the conference six years, is that there were people, like me, usually from different arms of bio hacking. There's the people really focused on the brain or on nootropics or extreme athletes or cold or whatever hyperbaric, but there was no clearing house. There was no community. What would happen if you took a nootropic and you're in hyperbaric right after using cold therapy with a red light in your nostril 'cause it turns out, it's additive. It's cool that you, as someone who's early to doing that, joined into the community and that we have a name for what we do now because before you were just a weird dude, and you're like, "Do I talk about this, or do I not talk about this?"

Luke: Totally. Well, that's the thing. Back when I got into all this stuff you were just called a health nuts. My friends would ask me, "What are you eating?" And I'd be eating some strange herb or medicinal mushroom. "Oh, you're one of those health nuts." Or, using some bio hacking technology or alternative medicine, [inaudible 00:08:26] machine, something like that, and people would be like, "Oh, you're a health nut." And that wasn't a very appealing word, so yeah, I'm very grateful that you actually coined that term and put it out there.

Dave: It's kind of like the modern equivalent of vegan.

Luke: Yeah, exactly. It is good that there's actually something to call it now, and also, I think something I talked about at Upgrade Labs recently is I did one talk that was all about water, actually, about just procuring spring water, and I'm such a water fanatic, so that

was one talk, but then I did one, as you said, kind of on meditation and mindfulness, and to me, all of the physical practices have been just a catalyst for me to really strengthen the vehicle of the body to my real work and my mission here, and I think that's something we share. You've expressed that at times in the past where the health stuff is great, but that's not going to give you necessarily lasting fulfillment, but if you have no energy, and your mitochondria are fried, and you're living in EMF soup like I currently am under a bunch of fake light, good luck being a nice person and having a spiritual mission on the planet.

Luke: I'm thankful that all of these practices are now kind of becoming popular because it makes it easier to get access to them, and now more companies are motivated to actually make really great products like I've got my Juve red light device behind me, and that didn't exist a few years ago except in very obscure realms, and now people are seeing that there's a financial incentive to actually produce really high quality products, and so it's becoming more accessible, and also more acceptable. You're not considered a weirdo.

Luke: I mean, I'm always shocked, like especially, I think about 65% female fan based on social media and my podcast, and I'm always shocked that they're so obsessed with bio hacking because it's such like a male normative kind of nerdy thing, or at least it used to be, and now it's like-

Dave: There's a lot of women bio hackers.

Luke: I know. That's what I'm saying, and even in my former industry in Hollywood, all these celebrities are going to the cryo-centers and going to Upgrade Labs and really getting down with all this stuff, so I feel like I've been kind of doing my wood-shedding for the past 22 years in really integrating all of this stuff and now having an opportunity to be able to create a platform around it, and people are receptive which is just so cool.

Dave: It's easy to get trapped in this kind of fearful mindset, and you got this we live in this blue-lit, microwaved world and the water's toxic, and everything around is around you is bad, and you see that out there, and it reminds me sort of like the orthorexia perspective. The idea of, "Oh my God, if I eat the wrong thing, I might die." Or, "If I turn on the wrong light, I might die."

Dave: So there's that negative energy sort of thing, but you actually talk about negativity fasting. That was actually, I think, at Upgrade Labs if I remember right. So, what is negativity fasting, and how do you use it?

Luke: Well, like any fast, say you go on a water fast where all you're going to have is water. You're not going to have any macro nutrients, no carbohydrates, fats, sugars, etc, and so I like the process of purifying the body, and from time to time, I do actual fasting, and I do a lot of ... I think actually when I started drinking Bulletproof Coffee, and I'm not trying to be a Bulletproof kiss-ass, but it's part of my story, but I started intermittent fasting without even knowing it just because I was getting ketones.

Dave: Yeah, totally. I didn't want breakfast. Done.

Luke: Right. Yeah. So I started to notice everyone in the office was whining all day about eating lunch. I'm like, "What is wrong with you guys? It's only 5:00." I see the value in withdrawing from certain activities whether that be food, drink, sex, whatever in order to kind of recalibrate, and so when I talk about negativity fasting, it's really ... It comes from, I think, originally Emmet Fox, and some of those early metaphysical Christian Scientist teachers, Napoleon Hill, these kind of guys that were around in the 20's and 30's. There was a real strong movement at that time which was all about the mind and really having dominion over your thoughts and the fact that thoughts carry energy, and they actually power, and so I started to notice when I got sober, because I was just so suicidally depressed and homicidal and just had racing, obsessive thoughts, and was just a neurotic basket case because of all the damage that I had done to myself in those years that I was on that path.

Luke: And so, what happened for me was I started sobering up and detoxing my body, but my mind was just so perpetually negative, and it was like I was addicted to complaining, whether or not I was verbalizing it or not. Sometimes just in my mind, just like, "God, those bastards." Just resenting people and hating people or ruminating on guilt and shame about mistakes that I'd made and things like that.

Dave: You had a voice in your head that was mean.

Luke: Yeah, very mean voice. A real a-hole living inside my brain, and I couldn't shut it off. Hence, doing 40 years of zen neurofeedback. I've done a lot of things on a physical level, too, to assist the brain, but really this is more of a spiritual practice, and negativity fasting, it's any time that my perception paints something as dark, negative, wrong, bad, is to get really quick at sort of like thought sniper type practice where I'm seeing anytime my mind says, "That's bad. That's wrong." And deleting that thought and eliminating that thought, and it's really kind of based on the Shakespearean principle there's no such thing as good or bad, only thinking makes it so. And that's hard for some people to hear, especially your skeptic analytical type, but I truly believe that reality is created by the thoughts we have, because that's been my experience.

Luke: Negativity fasting would be like I go out to my car right now, and I get a parking ticket. And one way to look at that parking ticket could be like, "F-you city of Los Angeles. Are you serious? $85. Really? $85" To some people that's like a couple days of groceries. And then just start ruminating on how wrong it is, what a victim I am, how I'm going to pay them back and get them, the whole thing, when another way to look at it would just be like, "That's interesting. There's a piece of wood pulp on a piece of glass that's connected to a piece of metal that's on four pieces of rubber that's sitting on some asphalt, and it has something called ink on it that's supposed to mean something to me."

Dave: And plus parking was going to be $50 if you paid for it. It really just at $35 convenience fee. That's way you look at it.

Luke: Exactly. In LA that's true.

Luke: So, the negativity fasting is just like ... It comes back to the course in miracles too. Would I rather be right, or would I rather be happy? Making that choice of self righteousness, indignation, complaining, fault-finding or actually making the decision to have some sort authority over how I'm going to feel, and to me, my feelings and emotions are usually dictated by the thoughts that I give energy, and so it's my daily practice to not say anything negative about myself, about life, about reality, and if possible, to squelch even negative thoughts as they arise, 'cause they're still going to come. They only really start to grow if I give them energy, and this the practice for anyone that's in recovery from addictions like I mentioned before. This is ground zero. You've got to do this, otherwise life becomes so painful from having a negative perception of it, that people, like me, seek ways of escape from those negative feelings that can sometimes be very destructive and even life-threatening at a certain point.

Dave: You talk about how, in your experience as a bio hacker and a meditation teacher and all that, that reality is created by your thoughts. What role do emotions and feelings have in creating reality?

Luke: You know, it's interesting. I've noticed that it's definitely true for me and most people that I have worked with and observed that a feeling is oftentimes a result of a thought. There's a thought about something, and then the mind has a perception, then it creates this usually negative or sometimes positive feeling, but there are times where a feeling just comes up and it can't really be identified, and then, so what happens is the mind tries to find out what's wrong in the environment, and the ego comes in and tries to sense what the threat is, and then you have to rumination thing where you're going think, feel, think, feel, think, feel, and that's a real trap.

Luke: So, my practice in terms of emotions and feelings and sensations in the body is really learning how to allow them to be there even when they're painful and uncomfortable and not to get caught up in the habitual mind game of trying to label those feelings or find the cause of those feelings or trying to escape.

Luke: So, when the sensation comes up and I feel a sense of anxiety or a wave of maybe sadness or depression, I spent my whole life with exogenous methods of changing that, whether it be a cell phone, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, pornography, spending money, just some dopamine-producing behavior, essentially to shut down that sensation. And what I've found is that it's really natural to actually just experience negative feelings and emotions at times because there are so many unseen influences in our environment and in our life and in our subconscious, in our psyche that we have literally no control over, and that really where the problem arises is when I suppress and repress, whether consciously or unconsciously those negative sensations and emotions 'cause then what happens is they start to bottle up, and next thing you know, I'm acting out in some way, trying to avoid those feelings when the funny thing about it is the fastest way around a feeling is through it.

Luke: And so I've really gotten in the practice of just facing negative feelings head on and just kind of saying, "Hey. All right. Here I am. Come and get me." And most of the time,

those negative times turned out to be boogie men, and within moments, they've dissipated without anything really having to be done about them.

Dave: A lot of the Buddhist teachings are aligned with the idea that feelings happen, and then the thought happens, and at 40 years of zen, the neurofeedback year, I can show you that your body knew the feeling, sometimes up to three seconds before you had the thought.

Luke: Right.

Dave: But you think the feeling came about from the thought, but that's just that mean voice in your head, also known as the ego, that's sabotaging you. You felt uncomfortable because your survival pattern matching things happened, then you made up this story in your head, "I'm uncomfortable because this guy's a jerk or whatever."

Luke: Right. Right. Right. Right.

Dave: How much validity is there in that dance, [inaudible 00:19:23] meditation guy, the dance between I felt it, I told myself a story, I believed the story to be true, versus I told myself a story, it caused a feeling, and I told myself the feeling to be real.

Luke: You know, honestly, in my experience, Dave, it goes both ways. Sometimes there is I just start a negative thought pattern, and at least there's no discernible feeling or emotion associated with it, it's just my mind is just sometimes has that negativity bias, and it just looks for what's wrong in my environment or in my life experience, and then I start to feel these welling negative emotions, so there's that side of it, but from the perspective of there's a sensation going on, and then the mind tries to label and create meaning out of what that experience is, I think that's probably more common.

Luke: I know we've both interviewed Byron Katie who I just spent four days with over New Years. I did something called a mental cleanse, her new year's mental cleanse which was very arduous, hard-core experience of really taking a look at that voice in your head, and it was funny because I was having, and I just sort of started exploring a new relationship, and I was getting triggered by the relationship because I had taken a year and a half off from dating and sex and all of that, and just really, really went inside and just reworked a lot of things within myself. So, I started to re-enter that, and I was at the Byron Katie thing kind of freaking out, and you do this thing called The Work which is where you put your thoughts on paper, and you question whether or not those thoughts are true, so I really got to see in real time ... I've been into her work for ages. I think I saw her speak 25 years ago the first time.

Dave: She's OG personal development.

Luke: I mean, she's just-

Dave: She's fantastic. I loved that interview.

Luke: She's locked ... She's made something so complex within the human experience so simple, and so in a situation like that, here I am, so I'm at the Byron Katie event at some crappy not cool-looking hotel by LAX, and I'm starting to feel these emotions come up because I'm afraid, I'm being vulnerable, I'm being intimate with someone, I'm starting to open my heart a bit, and so these feelings come up, and then my crazy mind ... I was watching it in real time as she's doing her course, my crazy mind starts creating meaning out of these scenarios, and then like you said, those thoughts start going.

Luke: But without the ability to, whether it's through her modality or not, without having the ability to question the validity of those thoughts, they're just going to take me over and run with me, and it all started just because there was an uncomfortable feeling that, as you said, the ego, the mind, has to come up with some sort of categorization or meaning behind it, and in that is where the real suffering happens.

Dave: It's a constant dance, and the longer I do meditation retreats in Nepal or neurofeedback, the 40 years of zen stuff, I just get more and more aware. I pretty much never trust the story. It's one of the laws and game changers.

Luke: Totally.

Dave: The story's probably wrong. It's an assumption, and it goes back to like the four agreements book. I'm sure you've read it. I think I've seen you talk about this some time or another, and how one of them is don't make assumptions, and usually in your story, you're assuming you know what the other person is thinking, and you're usually wrong. You only know what the other person's doing. And if what they're doing is out of integrity ... Like, "I know that they slapped me in the face." Well, that's a pretty hard evidence that there's something not okay going on, but that voice, "Maybe she's texting me or not texting me because of whatever." Maybe she was pooping, and she didn't want not text you. You just don't know. It could be something or gross or whatever, and you don't know, but you're going to make up this whole story, and I think it's just part of being human, but I don't have that voice in my head anymore. It's gone, and that's been really useful for me.

Luke: Well, listen man, whatever you're doing, I need to do more of because mine's gotten much, much better, but there still are times, every once in a while, I get trapped for a period where the mind is making up some narrative about reality, and I'll actually believe it, and I think that's real goal of ascension and what I would consider enlightenment is to become free of actually believing the fake news that your mind creates.

Luke: I recently did a talk in New York, and that came to me. I said, "You know what? The mind is fake news." You really can't trust it. You can use it to do math. You can balance the books. You can go get your tire changed. The mind is great for a lot of uses, but it's not very good for deciphering other people's behavior, and for, as you said, making assumptions and guesswork and trying to figure out how to become safe, and that's really useful information, especially because in many traditions, the ego is considered like sin. We demonize this thing that's trying to protect us. It's just doing its job. It's just the animal part of us trying to figure out, use the mind, the super computer that's there

to protect the animal, and it's trying to figure out what the other person is doing and what this means so that it can become safe, and I think that once we realize that it's innocent, that it's there for our benefit that it's not to be trusted, we're on our way to being on the right track, and to live a life where that voice is quieter and speaks up less frequently and where we believe it less is the real key to fulfillment and happiness.

Dave: It's kind of funny. We're both bio hackers, and here we are talking about the age-old stuff that people have been working on for thousands of years [inaudible 00:25:05] on top of it. You've done a bunch of neurofeedback. What's your experience with that versus the 21-day silent things that you've done in India?

Luke: You know, it's funny. I was thinking about actually prior to our call, just thinking back to a couple years ago. It must have been two, maybe even three years that I did 40 years of zen when it out in Sedona, and I went there over my birthday in the month of October, drove out by myself, picked up some spring water, of course, at the spring there, and stayed in a little Air BnB. I was doing cold plunges in the creek, almost fell off the rocks at one point because it was so cold I couldn't climb back out.

Luke: So, the whole experience was great, but in terms of actually doing the neurofeedback, I think what was interesting about for me was, and I don't know that there's any way to produce this naturally without the science involved in neurofeedback, but the sense I got is that my brain was watching my brain, and then teaching itself how to respond to stimuli which is a really interesting phenomenon because in meditation and mindfulness practice, of course over time, you start to get this witness perspective where you see the thoughts coming before they take hold, and you see the emotions, and you're seeing, "Wow. I'm a sol. My higher self is observing the phenomena of my personality and the mind and the ego." But that's really a soul watching the sort of lower nature. Whereas in neurofeedback, it's the physical mind. It's the brain watching the brain, and then you, as your spiritual self, or the witness perspective, watching that phenomenon take place also.

Luke: So, it's really profound and unique, and I don't know how else you could achieve that without that technology.

Dave: I mean, you could do it, but it usually takes 20 to 40 years.

Luke: Exactly.

Dave: That's what attracted me to this starting back in the early 90's, and I've worked with a bunch of different practitioners, and I've worked with a bunch of different technologies I've had at home, and in the last couple of years, we've come out with some new proprietary stuff with no wave forms that we didn't have the ability to manipulate even three years ago in the program, so I'm excited. Just constant evolutions in that space, but you want to talk about who the health nuts are, that's pretty cutting edge bio hacking if you kind of dig in on what it all might be, but it sounds like it worked for you.

Luke: Oh yeah. I mean, just having more access, I think for me, with the alpha training was more access to creativity and actually being able to find flow state easier, and even just being able to differentiate when I'm in that state and when I'm not and being able to choose a project that I may or may not work on when I'm in that state, and if I can't achieve that state, I do something rote that doesn't require creativity or personality.

Luke: So, it was actually a very interesting experience, and I've done subsequent neurofeedback after that, just working on focus or working on sleep or going through a particularly stressful time in work, in relationships, etc, and just I need to go in and get a dry float tank theta experience. It's just incredible what-

Dave: At Upgrade Labs.

Luke: Yeah, it's incredible what you can do to alter your emotions by going through the route of the brain. It's really fascinating, and I love merging the metaphysical, the spiritual realm with the technology because I think there's so much potential, and I actually interviewed Chris Keen on my podcast, your 40 years of zen guy recently, and he was telling me about some of the updates you guys did, and I'm like, "That sounds very cool."

Luke: Because in the old version of it, you weren't supposed to take neutropics, and there were a lot of rules because there was a third party involved, and so it was a little bit more restrictive, and Chris is like, "Yeah, we just totally blew the roof off, and we just do whatever we want now." So I'm like, "That sounds pretty cool."

Dave: Yeah, we're continuing to evolve that, and that's one of the things that brings me joy is just developing the hardware and the software in such a way that no one else on earth is doing that, as long as it works.

Dave: Now, there's another technology that we've both spent a lot of time with, one that really helped open my door to the spiritual stuff, and it's called breathing. Breath work, like holotrophic breath work. Stan Groff has been on the show, on Bulletproof Radio, and he's the guy who invented holotrophic breath work, although frankly, he kind of borrowed it from the Tibetan and some [inaudible 00:29:58] practices, but I've left my body. I've become one with the universe and had all kinds of strange visions and personal growth things just from breathing, and in Game changers, I write about some of those and why breathing is a massive technology for this.

Dave: What is your specific experience with breath work, and what kind of breath work do you teach when you teach breath work?

Luke: Well, you know, I've had numerous experiences. I've done some sessions with some people in New York. They have a place called Woom Center W-O-O-M, and they do sort of a sound experience combined with holotrophic breathing, and they've studied with Stan, so I've done that. I've done the [inaudible 00:30:40] Hoff breathing, and after I started to get exposed to some of these breath work workshops and things like that, I realized, "Guys, you're doing [inaudible 00:30:51] Yoga." As you said, because I've been

practicing Hatha Yoga now for over 20 years. I don't do that style that regularly now. About seven, eight years ago, I discovered [inaudible 00:31:07] yoga which is ... For those that aren't experienced in that, it's much different than other types of yoga because you don't really hold stretches. There's a lot of really strange movements you do with your hands. There's a lot of chanting. There's a lot of different breath patterns that are used, and these technologies are going back thousands of years, and no one's really sure what cave in the Himalayas they came from, but humans have figured out for a very long time that you can get high on your own supply.

Luke: So, I've been through, I think, [inaudible 00:31:37] Hoff trainings, and every time I do it, I'm like, "Yep, here we are [inaudible 00:31:40] yoga again." So, what I teach comes out of that tradition, and depending on the type of workshop I'm doing or what the goals are, I'll typically do something that includes mantra, and that sound vibration to me is a really important part of the breath work, and even if I do, at home, just a simple six minutes, 11 minute breath work session when I'm watching the sunrise which is one of my favorite practices to combine with that is being grounded and sun gazing. I always have to have mantra on. It's just part of the process now because that's ... It's like if I'm going to sit there and do the breath work, I might as well have something meaningful and a vibration going on at the same time.

Luke: So the patterns that I use ... It's funny, I just did one yesterday. I went to a Kundalini yoga class, and there was like, just for an example, with your right hand, you sort of do ... I don't know if anyone will see this video, but you sort of do that, I think it was nonu nonu that Robin Williams-

Dave: Yeah, the live long and prosper.

Luke: Yeah, yeah, the live long and prosper. You do that with your right hand, and then you have your left palm facing down about the level of your peck, and then you do round mouth inhale and exhale, deeply and slowly and powerfully as your left hand sort of gyrates to the exterior of your body and back toward the body. And this goes on for 11 minutes to the tune of a mantra, and then at the end, you do a long breath hold, and I'm bursting into tears, having as you said, having this awakening, which for me, yesterday was about just further opening my heart and just being open to intimacy and love and things like that, and I had this amazing revelation, and it was triggered by nothing than just some really profound music and my own breath and the intention to expand and evolve.

Luke: But it's not even that the teacher said, "Okay, this is a breath and the mudra for opening your heart." She's just like, "We're going to do a cool meditation now." The next thing you know, I'm transported into this other world, having almost a psychedelic experience, and so the thing that I really like about kundalini yoga and why I like teaching that is there are literally thousands of different movements, breath patterns, mantras, that all induce different experiences, and oddly enough, they were all sort of brought to western culture by a guy named Yogi [inaudible 00:34:01], and there's books and books and books, and thousands and thousands of what you call yoga sets where he does all these different combinations of movement and breath and all that, and you

could live five lifetimes and probably never do them all, and so, I think the novelty of that is what keeps me coming back to that, that practice.

Luke: Although, I do just standard wim hof method when it's just I don't want to think, and I don't have access to my workbooks and things like that, but I think this is just something that's inherently largely been lost in our domestication is our access to the elements.

Luke: And it's funny, when you read the fact of the day, because when I was thinking about the final question that you ask, or I don't know if you ask it anymore now that you have a book out, but I was like, it's connecting to nature and getting in touch with the elements, and one of those elements is air, and we need it. It's not just the oxygen, it's the breath of life, and so using your spiritual will to have the discipline and the determination to really work with your body, your physical vessel, to bring that air in and out in all of these different ways with these strange nostril holds and movements with the hands, there's like an endless treasure trove of ways that we can access our environment and connect to nature in that way.

Dave: It's powerful stuff, it's still something that I think a lot of people listening are a little skeptical about. How is it possible that, in taking some strangely structured breaths can have this weird effect, but it does, and different traditions, whether you're talking about an aboriginal tradition in Australia or something at the North Pole, or something in South America, or something in North America, it doesn't matter. Indigenous people, not to discount all of Asia with all the different cultures there, they all have breathing practices that are ancient, so it seems like it does something. So, even if you're really skeptical and listening to this guy, seriously, it's okay just try it or go to a yoga class. If they say [inaudible 00:36:14], that means that they're going to teach you how to breathe.

Dave: Try it. I say try it with a teacher because you'll probably do it wrong if you're just doing it, or try it on YouTube. It's all good, but there's something magic, and if you do it for 10 minutes or 20 minutes, however long they say for that kind of thing, I mean, I've seen some crazy stuff.

Dave: I did this thing, this must have been like 14, 15 years ago, it was billed as a breathing meditation, and I get there, and what you do, it's called the Tibetan breath of fire, but you do it blindfolded in this big room. It was actually an old church that had been converted into like a community center.

Dave: And then, the lights are all. You're all blindfolded, and a DJ comes in, and everyone starts dancing. And you're like, okay, you're going to whack into people because you're blindfolded. There's going to be black eyes, there's going to be ... And you know what? You don't, and it's the weirdest thing. We're in very altered states just from the breathing, and you dance for like, I don't know how long it was, probably a couple hours, and never hit anybody. No one ever got hurt. It was like my body developed some sense of radar, and I wasn't hyper focused. You were just listening to this loud music, but somehow, I can't explain that stuff using science the way we do it. I actually had like micro-radar transceiver algorithms. It doesn't ... You can't do it. But it worked.

Luke: It's funny that you mentioned that actually because one of the things that taught in kundalini yoga is that you can actually manipulate your auric field or your magnetic field with the breath work which would indicate that proprioception acuity that you experienced.

Luke: I'm definitely more on the woo-woo side, and I would say I have some rationality to me. I don't just go along with anything. To me, it's all about results. I'll try something. If I don't get a result, I'm done. If something happens, I don't so much care why or how, I just want to know that it works.

Luke: It's funny you mentioned the [inaudible 00:38:12]. Years ago, I was doing Hatha Yoga, and I had this great teacher, [inaudible 00:38:13]. Just really old school Ayurvedic, just pure tradition, does not deviate, it's not power yoga, not gym yoga, like he's the real deal, been to India a million times, and he taught me something called alternate nostril breathing which is also in fitness they use it, and it's called box breathing. It was a couple years ago. So, I do that when I need to calm down. It's very calming to your nervous system, and even like before interviews, I often do that to ground myself.

Luke: And then a couple years ago, I was doing an escape and urban evasion course at Neil Strauss's house. I think Neil's been on your show too, and Neil-

Dave: I think like 2010. Yeah. It was fantastic. You did it. Tell me what you did.

Luke: Neil's just ... He's a nut. It's into all this stuff. He wrote a book called Emergency which is about all this kind of stuff, and so he invited me over and met some really great friends that I'm still friends with today.

Luke: But anyway, we have these ex-military guys, like these are not guys you F with. These are real deal, [crosstalk 00:39:12] they've killed. They've killed a lot of people. They are not playing around, and so we go out to get tasered. You get tasered. You get waterboarded, and then they're like, "We're going to teach you this breath. It's called combat breath." And I thought, "Oh wow. Fascinating. I love breathing, so what have you got?" And they go ahead, and they teach me the Ayurvedic, ancient yogic practice of alternate nostril breathing. That's literally what it was, and they're like, "This is what you do when you get captivated in Afghanistan, and you're going to be beheaded. This is how you calm your nervous system."

Luke: So, there's experience like that that validity from the linear world of science and practicality that actually validate these practices and their efficacy, and I find it interesting when a practice or modality crosses the lines like that. That, to me, is something to pay attention to.

Dave: You talk about having a soul mission or a life mission in some of what you do, and you've talked about how you went to Date with Destiny with Tony Robbins, and Tony's been on Bulletproof Radio, and kind of a larger than life figure, and you said you came out with a laser focus on your true purpose to follow your life's mission. I know a lot of people, people who are reading Game changers right now, and people who have asked

me over the years like, "How do I know what my life's mission is?" How did you figure out what yours was, and what is it?

Luke: I mean, Tony Robbins is just a force to be reckoned with first off. If you go to one of his events and something doesn't happen for you, you might want to check your pulse, whether his personality jives with you or not, he's figured a lot out psychologically, and he knows how to change your energy, so definitely something I would recommend to most people.

Luke: The funniest thing about doing a Tony Robbins thing for me is the most challenging is I'm really picky about music, and I can't stand techno kind of music. I'm a musician. I like blues. I like laid back music, so I was just going, "Oh my God." The hardest thing is not the emotional inner work. The hardest thing is not running out of the room when this really crappy music plays, and all the blue light in my face and all that.

Dave: I had to wear my hat and glass the whole time-

Luke: Oh totally.

Dave: Except when I was on stage. And you're like, "I'll take off the hat. I'm still wearing the glasses."

Luke: Right. But, to me, it's like I've known in a more broad sense for along time that what my purpose is here, at least what brings me the most fulfillment is to alleviate suffering for other people because I'm someone who just ... Frankly, I've suffered a lot. Not so much in recent years, but I had a really rough childhood and endured a lot of abuse and trauma, and through all those years that I was describing earlier of just complete reckless, self destruction, pain and abuse on myself, and so ... And there's physical issues and illnesses and all kinds of things that I've overcome, and it's like every time I overcome a hurdle, I'm just driven to pass on that information, so I've known, in a sense, that my mission is to help alleviate suffering for other people in ways that I've done so for myself because once I crack the code, it's like, "Oh my God, I got to get on top of a mountain and share this information. You don't have to suffer."

Luke: Like you find something for like neurofeedback. Someone has PTSD, and I'm like, "You know, you can cure that in a few weeks?" "Really?" It's like, "Yeah. I've done it."

Luke: So, that was kind of my broad mission, but as I started to really drill down, I was really looking at the human needs that I'm trying to fulfill, and this is kind of the core of that last Tony Robbins experience, and it was great to be able to have it articulated in that way because I know I have these drives that motivate me to make decisions to do something or not do something, and having discovered in myself that yeah, I do have really high empathy and compassion for other people, and I want to alleviate suffering, I still am very much addicted to control and controlling my environment and controlling everything with the health practices, like you said. Kind of the orthorexia side of that, and that really, one of my core values has been certainty and wanting to know how everything's going to go and be safe all the time kind of thing.

Luke: When I really started to look at that, not that that's a wrong way to live, but I started to see that all of the things I have done professionally or personally, that I thought were to achieve certain goals, really at the end of those goals, if you sort of look over the hill ... Okay, so if you get the career, if you get the house, if you get the wife, the family, the notoriety, the fame, the money, whatever it is that you're going after, what's on the other side of that? Well, the other side of that is the sense of love and connection.

Luke: And so, having really re-oriented myself as that's the thing that I really want, well, how do I achieve that love and connection on a daily basis, and not that much had to change in terms of my game plan. It's more about the intention behind it, and it was in alignment with my original intention which was to alleviate suffering, but to do so in a way that's more connected and more intimate and actually allow a bit more freedom in terms of my own capacity to care about people and allow them to care about me.

Luke: And what really came out of that for me, the word that came out of it was a healer, and it was so strange to discover that because I have a negative connotation about a healer, you're like a flake that does Reiki or that kind of healer ... There's a lot of snake oil kind of healers, and I don't see myself as that kind of healer that works on that level, but because love and connection and being of service is what's most important to me, in a sense, I really am a healer, and when I look at the impact I've had on some people in my immediate life, intimate and personal friends, relationships, etc, I really have helped people to overcome some profound challenges, and I think that's really my life's purpose, and perhaps I'm just starting to do that in a way that's a bit more scaled up and is appealing to and affecting people in mass rather than just one-on-one, a friend here, a family member here, where I'm able to help them work through some things.

Luke: And so, that's kind of where I've arrived in 2019, is kind of, as much as I was reluctant to be that guy, it just seems as though that might be my fate and also might be what would really lead to my sense of living a life that's on purpose and really doing what I'm here to do which is clearly not picking out shoes for movie stars for the red carpet as I did for 17 years, and trying to be a rock star, and not doing very well at that. There's a lot of different things I've done that I've been successful at or at least marginally successful at, but they haven't really fed my heart, and so what I'm about now is about love and service. That's my mission.

Dave: Beautiful. It's been a long time evolving for you. If you could've told yourself something when you were 20 about this path, if you could go back in time and do that, what would you say?

Luke: Dave, I think I would tell myself that I was worthy of love, that I was worthy of happiness, that I was worthy of success. Something that I struggled with a lot when I was younger was just this overwhelming sense of shame that I carried that there was something wrong with me, that I was flawed, that I was unlovable, that I wasn't deserving of happiness. So, if I could back, I think at any point in my life, 20 or otherwise, it would probably be to really imprint that message that's like, "You're doing okay, man. You're good. You deserve to be happy, and you deserve to be loved." And that one took a long time to be able to actually own, and now at 48 years old, I feel most

of the time that I have access to that experience, but at 20, oh my God, I felt ... I was just so deprecating is just such an understatement. I had deep self hatred at 20 years old.

Dave: So did I, and it's hard to get yourself to listen [crosstalk 00:47:24]. A lot of people will carry that with them for their whole life, and it's unnecessary, and it's a huge burden on society, because when you have, you treat the environment that way, you treat other people like that. Your filter on the world doesn't make the world a better place. That's for sure.

Dave: So, whatever, whether it's breathing, meditation, neurofeedback, coffee, or whatever the heck else it takes to get you out of that, therapy, MDR, it's up to each of us to figure out what's going to turn that off because it's like driving a car with a broken exhaust pipe spewing crap everywhere. You don't want to be the guy doing that.

Luke: Yeah, well I think that's why the physical practices do have validity. It's important. It's like if you want to have the experience of self love and self acceptance so that you can reflect that back to others because you have it to give, try doing that when your sleep sucks or you're living with your head next to a smart meter, or you're living in a junk light environment 24/7, and you have no connection to nature and all of those things.

Luke: I always count in the physical part, but then again, you can't just do the physical bio hacking and not really address the deeper psychological issues and spiritual disconnect either. Then you're a guy or girl that's really ripped and healthy and has a great gut biome, but you still hate your life, and you have no sense of purpose.

Luke: I think balance is really the thing that's starting to become key for me is to explore all these different areas and find ways to integrate them and to become whole and not too hung up on any one of those different sort of quadrants of our experience.

Dave: That's a great way of putting it.

Dave: Well, I've got one more question, sort of the new question at the end of the show, and this one is interesting because I've been pretty public about this fact that I am actively working on living to 180 years old.

Luke: I've heard you say that, and I want to know why did you pick that particular number?

Dave: It's pretty straight forward because I've seen 120. I know we can do it, and when I started with the last 20 years of improvement and all the stuff that I know, I think 120 is achievable, and Headstrong, it's really a book about longevity, especially in the brain because that's one the things, who cares if you make it to 120 if your brain's gone. It doesn't matter. That's the part that you work on first because it has to run. In order to work on the brain, of course, you have to work on your metabolism.

Dave: So, a lot of the current crop of anti-aging thinking it's like the pages of Headstrong. You turn it, and you're like, "Yep, yep, yep." Over on the mitochondrial theory of aging.

Dave: So, I went into that, that's 120, and given all the different studies, "Oh, this increases lifespan in animals by 20%, by 30% by 50% by 95%." I'm pretty darn confidence that in the next, oh, we'll just call it 136 or something years, I'm pretty sure we're going to get a 50% lifespan extension unless there's some sort of global war or famine, asteroid hitting the earth or some kind of big, external event. Pretty darn sure we're going to get 50%, and I'm pretty sure that I'll be there when we get there 'cause I don't think it's going to take very long.

Dave: So, I'm basically like what I know we could do plus 50%, and you look at historically what happened 50 years ago or 100 years ago. We didn't know about DNA. We couldn't spell mitochondria. We didn't even know about antibiotics or the role of bacteria, and we still don't even know the role of bacteria.

Dave: Someone just discovered, oh, it looks like there's actually bacteria inside the brain doing stuff, and it's not an infected brain, it's just kind of part of how the metabolism works, so there's probably a brain microbiome too. But we never noticed. We're like, "Oh, that's kind mind blowing."

Dave: So, all that stuff's going on. I know what we don't know, which is most of it, and I'm just like, "We can do this." And so I was actually in Men's Health this month. I don't know if you've had a chance to see it, but I'm in.

Luke: Oh cool.

Dave: As in like there's a picture of me with my shirt off as a former 300 pound guy which is like the most unlikely thing I would've ever voted in my entire life other than maybe being in Glamour magazine also which is not something I would've ever, as a fat computer hacker, expected.

Dave: Certainly, I would've been, frankly, terrified to have a shirt off photo, and you look close, and you're like, "Yeah, I've still got some stretch marks. I don't care." And that was kind of cool, but in the article, it's like, "Well, Dave's helped build his business by talking about this 180." So I'm going to ask you. Turn it around. 180 is my number. How long are you going to live?

Luke: Okay sure. I will answer that. I got to ask you one question, and I want to turn the interview around on you, and I know we're short on time, but with the mitochondria piece, have you looked into the relationship between deuterium and metabolic function?

Dave: Oh yeah, it's old stuff. Yeah, back in 2014, I looked at the one company that was shipping this stuff. You can get this water that's depleted in heavy isotropic hydrogen, and there's a few people recycling old stuff online about it now, and I actually have private research reports I've had done on it.

Dave: Here's the short deal on deuterium depleted water. It's terribly expensive, and makes a very small difference in mitochondrial function compared to anything else. You want to

look at ROI on your time and money and things. That's an example of orthorexia gone mad.

Dave: If you're dying of cancer, and you need that five percent bump, and you're willing to spend two grand a month to get it or to like freeze water and break it and freeze it and all this other crap, yeah, go do that. But maybe if you took that time and you did breath work, meditation, and got some sunshine, the ROI is about 10,000 times higher.

Luke: Right. Okay. Interesting.

Dave: Deuterium, it's a mouse net. It is so small and so inconsequential. And by the way, if you're going to be going after deuterium, you got to be going after radioactive potassium which affects ... You know about that?

Luke: No.

Dave: Well, there you go. It's called the banana-equivalent dose. And it turns out a substantial portion of potassium in our environment is also a radioactive isotope just like you have from deuterium water. So, basically, you better ... Oh wait. How are you going to filter that? You can't. So you could spend your life worrying, and just being terrified and living in a microwave blue-lit world filled with deuterium and bad water and threats from the angels or whatever the hell your current windmill to tilt at today is. But here's the deal. Focus on what gives you the highest ROI for your energy, and I'm telling you, after spending a substantial amount of time running down that rat hole, the ROI isn't there for deuterium depleted water. It's terribly expensive and just not necessary unless you're dying from cancer.

Luke: Well thank you for giving me that perspective, because I recently did about six hours worth of podcast content on the topic, and I got my levels tested. I did the water, which was quite expensive, for two or three months, and I got my deuterium levels way down. Now, as far as what that's going to do for me, I have yet to see because it's quite recent.

Dave: And how do you feel? Same as you did before?

Luke: Well, you know, it's tough to say, Dave, because I just found out about three weeks ago, unbeknownst to me, I've been living 100 yards away from two giant cell towers that were hidden behind this faux wall. I just randomly discovered it one day, so I've had all these health issues since I've lived here like dizziness, vertigo, bad sleep, just stuff. I'm going, "I'm like the biggest bio hacking nut on the planet here maybe after you or a couple other guys, and why is this happening?" And I realized I'm like in a massive line of fire here. So, my energy's not been that great, so I don't really know how the deuterium depletion effected me because there's this negative influence, so I'm looking for ... Actually, I was looking at a house this morning in Laurel Canyon. I took my RF meters and all my stuff. It was very clean EMF-wise, so I'm curious to see how my energy's going to be when I'm not in the environment that I'm in.

Dave: I'm just going to say that you probably spent ... If you did it for several months, you probably spent about $8,000 on water?

Luke: No, no. It wasn't that much. It was like $600 a month or something.

Dave: Okay, so for three months ... So you spent two grand.

Luke: Yeah. I mean, I spent more than that on other bio hacks. But anyway, okay, I'll get to your question. I've been so curious because I've not heard you talk a lot about that, and it's something I'm interested in.

Dave: No, I didn't put it in Headstrong for the simple fact that it didn't make the cut for important hacks.

Luke: Wow.

Dave: Like, you look at two grand on that. If you would've just bought RF-blocking paint and curtains and put those up for a thousand dollars, you probably would have had a thousand dollars to spend on grass-fed burgers and felt better.

Luke: I'm just like-

Dave: You could spin a yard out of it, but I can tell you, if you have unlimited money and unlimited time, you could do it. I've tried the water. If it was a nickel a bottle or the same price as other water, sure, throw it in there along with structured water, but exclusions on water is 10,000 times more important as far as I can tell.

Luke: Oh, one thing I did. One antidotal thing I can testify for for the depleted water is I got a dog, my first dog, Cookie. I got her about six months ago, and she had horrible allergies, and I got her on like a nice keto, super clean, raw food, very, very clean doggie diet, and it didn't really help. Eliminated the grains and all that, and then I put her, for three months, exclusively on the deuterium-depleted water, and all of her histamine sort of allergy, scratching hot-spot shit just went away 100%, and that's the only thing I changed, so there might be something to that.

Dave: There might be.

Luke: There is a histamine relationship that I can't begin to explain, but that was I think my one win so far.

Luke: All right, so the answer to your question, what age do I want to live to? You know, it's funny, Dave, because I really have a strong sense that there's a lot of reincarnation with us going on with us human bodies and souls, and I feel as though I've been here quite a few times, and it's possible that I might come back again, so from that, I guess it's more of a vedic world view perspective that I have, so from that perspective, I really don't want to be here any longer than I'm supposed to be. I feel that there's an ordained

expatriation date on my time in this body, kind of like the end of a movie's coming at two hours and three minutes, and it's just going to end when it's going to end.

Luke: That said, I'm feeling like I'm making so much progress within this one lifetime in this body that I'm not eager to leave it at all because I'm really growing by leaps and bounds, and I think my soul's evolution has come a long way.

Luke: So, I don't want to put a number on it, but I would like to say that I'm not so concerned with how I live, but how well I live. I want to live until the day where this [inaudible 00:58:34] stops functioning effectively and I'm suffering. I don't want to be old and decrepit and suffer. I want to live as long as that universal intelligence has designed me to live and long enough for me to fulfill whatever I was supposed to fulfill in this life experience as this thing they call Luke's Storey.

Dave: It's really an interesting perspective. If you look at the human body as kind of an [inaudible 00:59:00] it doesn't really exist because you take food in, and you shed cells, so you're actually just taking matter in, replacing matter, and then getting rid of matter. The day you stop moving and evolving and learning and growing is the day that you're basically dead. That's almost the definition of death right there, so my real age isn't 180 either. It's ... I'd like to die at a time and by a method of my choosing.

Luke: Right.

Dave: That when I'm done, I'm done. But I'm pretty sure that there's enough big problems to solve in just this amazing world we live. I'm going to be in use for at least that long.

Luke: Absolutely. Well, it's funny you mentioned that because some of the great yogis and saints, especially from India, there's all these tales where they've come to the ripe old age of 90 or 101 or whatever they were, and they made the decision, "Okay, I'm ready to drop the body." And very peacefully just said, "Okay, I'm done with this particular incarnation. I'm just checking out." And they've got their [inaudible 01:00:03] around. They're like, "Okay. Bye guys." And that's the end.

Dave: I'll leave you a few relics.

Luke: Exactly.

Dave: And then they're off to the races.

Luke: It's an interesting perspective that way. I kind of like that, and I think that would probably be in alignment with me. As long as I'm useful here, I want to stay, and when I'm not, I'll freely leave and pop into some other little embryo somewhere across the planet somewhere.

Dave: All right. Well, here's to staying useful.

Dave: This was an episode with Luke Storey. You can find Luke's work at LukeStorey.com. That's L-U-K-E-S-T-O-R-E-Y .com to learn more.

Dave: Have an amazing day.